Leading the audience's eye

For those of you who are working on a short or who are working on a sequence, make sure that when you go from shot to shot that the composition of your characters works over the cut. You don't want to confuse the audience. By that I mean the following:

Looking at the Toy Story 3 teaser you can see how thought out the placement of the characters is over the cut. One of the shots is this one:


The soldier is talking to Woody. Looking up, so we expect Woody to be around here in the next shot:


... at least roughly. It would be really weird for Woody to be on the far right, so that the audience has to look around until they find him:

(altered picture)

... unless there is an important reason for that (still a bit jarring though).

In the trailer the next shot has Woody here:


And how acurate and well placed is he? Well, let's put both shots together:

Look at that!

And stuff like that is even present in crazy frantic sequences like the car chase in Bourne Supremacy. Last year I saw a presentation about that and it's really cool to see once you know where to look and what to look out for.

Cheers
JD

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